This week we're going to focus on that shot in Rebellion where we reveal the whole Stormtrooper
army. There are various techniques to doing this, and we're going to show you a couple
of them now, using HitFilm Pro. Lets do this. The first thing you'll need is a Stormtrooper
model, so I just went over to Google, typed in Stormtrooper 3D model and downloaded the
first one I could find for this tutorial. I actually selected this one off tf3dm.com.
It was the first model in the list, easy to download and it was an .obj so it will work
well in HitFilm. Once I'd uncompressed that model, I just went into HitFilm and selected
to import the 3D model. Now, because it was an .obj and it had the materials and everything
set up, it just worked straight away. Then I set up a new comp, just with the default
settings in this project which is 1080p, 25 frames a second. I dragged the Stormtrooper
onto the comp and then I went to the new layer button and added a camera. This moves the
entire thing into the 3D space. Next we want to make sure that our Stormtrooper is actually
standing on the floor, rather than half way through it as he is at the moment.
So we go into the Stormtrooper object and go into the model and then into the Stormtrooper
object itself. We change the middle anchor point up so that the feet are sitting on the
floor level. Unfortunately he's got black feet so we can't really see them, so I'm going
to change the background color to some kind of grey and then we'll see the soles of the
feet. Yeah, it just needs to be moved up a little bit more so it's standing on that red
floor line. Our Stormtrooper appears to be absolutely massive so what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go back to the world transform and scale it down to just 20%. Now because
we've moved down that anchor point, it's going to scale the Stormtrooper with the feet being
the reference point. Next I'm going to select the Orbit tool and
actually change the camera position so that we have a better view of what we're doing.
Now I'm going to create a plane. I'm actually going to make this a square plane because
it's going to make some of the things we're doing in the future a bit easier. And I'm
going to make it mid-grey. Now I'm going to drag this onto the timeline. 2 copies of it
actually, below our Stormtrooper. The bottom copy I'm going to rename to background. The
one above the background, I'm going to rename to floor. Then I'm going to change that layer
to a 3D plane. And here we can see it - it's standing upright behind our Stormtrooper so
we want to go into the transform controls and change the rotation x to 90, so it's sitting
on our floor. I'm then going to switch off the grid in the viewer because it's a bit
distracting and we're going to recreate that ourselves by adding a grid effect to this
floor layer. I'm going to change the settings in the grid effect so that point 1 is 00 and
point 2 is 20 by 20. Now this grid is far too thick so I'm going to change the border
radius down to 0.5. There we go - our floor is complete. Now there are several ways we
can duplicate our Stormtrooper. The most simple of those is to duplicate the model itself.
To do this, select the Stormtrooper layer, go into the models section and then select
the Stormtrooper itself. We can now right click on this and select duplicate. Now, making
sure that we have the selection tool selected in the viewer, we can just drag the selected
new copy of the Stormtrooper over to one side. Here we go - we have 2. I'm just going to
move the camera in, so we can see a bit better. And we can select both of these and duplicate
again and now move these, and we've got 4. Do the whole lot again, move them a little
bit behind these ones, now we've got 8. Now this is great and it works well. But it makes
it very time consuming to build up 100 Stormtroopers and then decide that maybe you want to offset
them slightly from the grid or make some variation. So we do have other ways of doing this. What
I'll do first is cleanup what I've got and I'm going to delete all the additional Stormtroopers
I created. So I've just got my one original Stormtrooper again. I'm now going to set him
to invisible and go get the particle simulator. Make sure you drag this on above the floor
layer. We can't see anything so skip forward a second or so so you can see the particles.
Here they are. Kind of all over the place. This is not what we want. So we're going to
go across to the emitter section and under emitter and shape, we're going to change the
shape to be a quad. And then we're going to attach that to the floor layer. And here you'll
see, the quad actually aligning with our floor. As you can see, the particles are still going
everywhere. So we're now going to change the size so we've got more space for our Stormtroopers.
Lets try 600. Actually maybe that's a little bit small, so we'll go up to 800. I'll just
reposition the camera a little bit so I can see more of the quad that I've created. But
as you can see, the particles are still everywhere. So I'm going to change this to a grid emitter,
and you'll see below that our grid is 10 by 10. That's important to remember. The particles
are still everywhere, so what we need to do is stop them moving. To do this, we need to
go into the particle system and go to the movement section. Here, we're going to increase
the life of the particles to, say, 30 seconds. But we're going to change the speed to 0.
Ha - here they go, they're sitting on the grid exactly like we want them to. But there
isn't enough. So we're going to need to increase the number
of particles. The clue to how many we need is in that grid x and y. So we can go into
the general section here - lets just expand this out so that we can see it that little
bit better - this is the particles per second property. So what we're going to do here is
go back to the start of our animation - the very first frame - set the particles per second
to 100, because that is the size of our grid, 10 times 10 in particles.
On that first frame, we're going to set a keyframe and set it to 100. We're then going
to move forward just one frame and set it to 0, so that they stop generating after one
frame. We're then going to go back up to the top of this layer and find the general section
and time shift it back one second. So all 100 of those particles will have been generated
before they even come into view. And there you have it - we have all of our particles
laid out exactly like we want, but they still don't look like Stormtroopers, so what do
we do? We go to the appearance section, change it to layer and change the source to the Stormtrooper
layer. And all of a sudden, we have 100 Stormtroopers. Now this is a very efficient way of us rendering
Stormtroopers, so it's very very quick. We can rotate around and see them all standing
there - fantastic. We've made a Stormtrooper army. But there's very little variation in
these Stormtroopers. In fact, there is none. So what can we do? We can go to the movement
variation section. Now, you need to be very subtle here, but if you add say 1 degree to
the x y and z rotation, and maybe offset the first and last properties in the center of
mass by maybe 5, then it means that all the Stormtroopers will be subtly different. Standing
at different orientations and different angles, like we have here. None of these lines are
perfectly straight. So fantastic - you've now generated a hundred Stormtroopers. But
what if you want more - a lot more. Well actually, this method is so fast, you
can easily have say 400 Stormtroopers - so lets try that. Lets make the width and height
much larger. Lets go for 2 and a half thousand in both cases - we can't really see this so
we're going to have to zoom out and reposition the camera a little bit. They've all got big
spaces in between them at the moment because we're not generating enough particles. But
lets make the grid 20 by 20. So double what we had before. And then we want to go down
to our particles per second and up that to 400. Because 20 by 20 is 400.
There you go - we've got a huge number of Stormtroopers now. About 400 of them. And
it's still very very fast. But you can still push this far further. I'm on an iMac here,
so hardly the most powerful machine in the world, but lets try 8000 by 8000 as our dimensions,
and we'll up this to 50 by 50 which means 2500 Stormtroopers. And there we go!
It's still thoroughly workable. Um, I might have made too many Stormtroopers. Er - this
is looking ridiculous. I think I will just go back to the 400. But as you can see, you
could use this technique for all sorts of things, so there could be tanks rather than
Stormtroopers, or airplanes. And you can use the movement variation settings to create
subtle changes like we have here - or really really massive changes in movement over time
which might be much more interesting in say, a space battle or something like that.
I hope you find this tutorial really interesting, please do consider subscribing and we'll see
you next week.